{"id":4440,"date":"2009-11-02T13:01:01","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T17:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=4440"},"modified":"2012-02-21T00:10:49","modified_gmt":"2012-02-21T05:10:49","slug":"zizek-communist-fidelity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/11\/02\/zizek-communist-fidelity\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek communist fidelity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce<\/em>. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print.<\/p>\n

What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity<\/strong>, On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject “Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism:’ Here are its opening statements:<\/p>\n

Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill . . . . Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system, In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries . . . . Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: “Everything began with the industrial\u00a0 revolution in 1750 . . .” \u2014and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: “Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist.”<\/p>\n

(To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.)<\/strong> “Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world” \u2014meaning that our goal should be to restore a “natural” balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial “maternal” order of nature.<\/p>\n

Fidelity to the communist Idea<\/strong> thus means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut etre absolument moderne<\/strong> \u2014we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of “instrumental reason” or “modern technological civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the fourth antagonism \u2014the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included\u2014 and the other three: it is only this reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism<\/strong>. There is nothing more “private” than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. (97)<\/span><\/p>\n

In the series of the four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one.<\/strong> Without it, all others lose their subversive edge \u2014ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded. <\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\ud83d\ude42 Judy Butler smile (click)<\/p>\n

Furthermore, one can even formulate certain aspects of these struggles in the terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only “private” concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell their products with a progressive spin. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that ensure good benefits for their staff and customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), and so on. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian battling against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire (98).<\/p>\n

There is another key difference between the first three antagonisms and the fourth: the first three effectively concern questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice. If humanity does not resolve its ecological predicament, we may all vanish; but one can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions.<\/p>\n

In Lacanese, we are dealing here with the gap that separates the series of ordinary signifiers (S2) from the Master-Signifier (S1), that is, with a struggle for hegemony: which pole in the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded will “hegemonize” the other three? One can\u00a0 no longer rely on the old Marxist logic of “historical necessity” which claims that the first three problems will only be solved if one wins\u00a0 the key “class” struggle between the Excluded and the Included-the logic of “only the overcoming of class distinctions can really resolve\u00a0 our ecological predicament.”<\/p>\n

There is a common feature shared by all four antagonisms: the process of proletarianization,<\/strong> of the reduction of human agents to pure subjects deprived of their substance; this proletarianization, however, works in different ways. In the first three cases, it deprives agents of their substantial content; in the fourth case, it is the formal fact of excluding certain figures from socio-political space.<\/p>\n

We should underline this structure of 3 + 1, namely the reflection of the external tension between subject and substance (“man” deprived of its substance) within the human collective. There are subjects who, within the human collective, directly embody the proletarian position of substanceless subjectivity. Which is why the Communist wager is that the only way to solve the “external” problem (the re-appropriation of alienated substance) is to radically transform the inner-subjective (social) relations.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is thus crucial to insist on the communist-egalitarian emancipatory Idea, and insist on it in a very precise Marxian sense: there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of the social hierarchy, stand directly for universality;<\/strong> they are what Ranciere calls the “part of no-part” of the social body.<\/strong><\/p>\n

All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” \u2014this was already the communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.\u00a0 Our question today is whether democracy is still an appropriate name for this egalitarian explosion.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009.\u00a0 Print. What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity, On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek communist fidelity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,78,77,18,15,20],"tags":[140],"class_list":["post-4440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-butler","category-class","category-political","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-tragedyfarce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4440"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8795,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4440\/revisions\/8795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}